THE END IS NEW
Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff
WORLD PREMIERE
Past event
- Price
- $27*
- Genre
- Theater
- Season
- Fall 2025
- DATE
- DEC 11-13
- TIME
- THU-SAT, 8 PM
- RUNTIME
- Approx. 65 minutes, no intermission
- COUNTRY
- USA
- Program
- Download Program Notes (PDF)
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About
Created by the founders of New Theater Hollywood, THE END IS NEW traces what happens when a collective dream dissolves.
This new play follows a film editor who is hired to take over the project of a recently deceased documentary filmmaker. Alone and haunted by the material, the editor attempts to navigate endless footage in hopes of finding meaning in a dramatic collective of once united characters. When the composer arrives, ready to score the film, the entire narrative begins to tilt – and the uneasy truths of the past lash out.
This play marks the latest work from Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff that deals with the slippery world of performance documentation. They are currently featured in MADE in L.A. 2025, with their film THEATER, which weaves a fictional narrative with documentary rehearsal and backstage footage from plays presented at their black box performance space in Hollywood. THE END IS NEW engages with theater, labor, and memory as it reflects on the desire to rewrite the past in the name of the future.
On December 12, there will be a post-show Q&A with Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff, moderated by REDCAT Deputy Director and Chief Curator, Performing Arts, Katy Dammers.
about the artists
Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff are an artist duo who work at the boundaries of visual arts, theater, and filmmaking. They currently operate New Theater Hollywood, a black box theater in Los Angeles. Henkel and Pitegoff’s practice is embedded in the founding and running of venues as sites of social and collaborative artistic work. Their expanded documentation of these spaces takes form through filmmaking, photography, sculpture and writing, and traces the economic, political, and personal rules or conditions under which shared space can exist.
Before relocating to Los Angeles, Henkel and Pitegoff lived for over a decade in Berlin, where they ran TV Bar, a bar and performance space, as well as New Theater, a storefront where they wrote and produced plays with artists, writers, and musicians. In 2017-2018, they were the artistic directors of the Grüner Salon at the Volksbühne Theater in Berlin.
New Theater Hollywood, founded in 2024 in a black box theater on Santa Monica Boulevard, produces experimental theatrical productions with artists, musicians, filmmakers, writers, and performers. Since opening, they have produced and hosted shows by Diamond Stingily, Asher Hartman, Caye Castagnetto, Tarren Johnson & Joel Cocks, PRICE, Stephanie LaCava, Casey Jane Ellison, Klein, Kalena Yiaueki, David Louis Zuckerman, Colin Self, Jasmine Johnson, Karl Holmqvist/Arto Lindsay/Klara Liden, Ruby McCollister, and Lily McMenamy.
Their work is included in Made in L.A. 2025 at the Hammer Museum, and has been exhibited recently at Fluentum, Berlin; MAMCO, Geneva; Fri Art Kunsthalle, Fribourg; and the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum, Berlin, among other venues.
Calla Henkel is also the author of two novels: Scrap (Abrams, 2024) and Other People’s Clothes (Doubleday, 2023).
Instagram: Calla Henkel / Max Pitegoff / New Theater Hollywood
cast and creative team
Writers and Directors: Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff
Cast: Mia Barron (Lennon)
Arne Gjelten (Eric)
Dino Wiand (Alessandro)
Beebe Smith (Eden)
Jake August (Seth)
Grace Kennedy Piehl (Celeste)
Frank Demma (Frank - video)
Jasmine Johnson (Eden - video)
Jean Marco Torres (Alessandro - video)
Michael Bonnabel (Frank - voice)
Original Live Score: MK Velsorf
Performers and Co-Composers:
Kevin Terrell Madison (piano)
Grace Dashnaw (cello)
Ben Babbitt (synthesizer, flute, guitar)
Movement Director: Tarren Johnson
Assistant Director: Jacob Pincus
Lighting Designer: Chu-Hsuan Chang
Set and Costume Designers: Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff
Production Assistant: David Louis Zuckerman
Stagehand: Danny Saravia Varela
Videoographers and Editors: Max Pitegoff, Calla Henkel,
Jacob Pincus, David Louis Zuckerman
Additional Video Cast: Lucy Parks Urbano, Riley Quinn Scott
Monologue Readers: Sara Sachs, Frederik Jacobi
Special Thanks: Matt Wolf, Karen Roth, John and Jill Donaty, Chance Gray, Alina Perkins, Alima Lee, Scott Cameron Weaver, Caye Castagnetto, Andy Roy, D.V. DeVincentis, Blaine O’Neill, Natasha Newman-Thomas, Valentina von Klencke, Georgia Ford
